[Edit: This post originally included a quirky joke with me linking the words “Bingo Card Creator serial” to a funny video on YouTube for SEO purposes. i.e. if someone searches for it on Google, they get the video instead of actually getting a crack of my software. Then I thought, wait, here’s a Seth Godin moment: why not make this an ideavirus?
If you are a shareware author, an uISV, or if you just want to take a stand against software piracy, you can do so in thirty seconds. Pick three software programs you enjoy, and write a blog post saying how easy it is to find Visual Studio keygens or Adobe Photoshop serialz or what have you. And link our happy pirate friends to that video on YouTube (why? Because its an insanely catchy tune, thats why!). Blam, instant Google bomb — or should we say, Google Cannon. Arr, pass the rum. Just a few people linking a small program will get that as the #1 result, and a few more people will cause it to rank highly for any query including words like keygen, serial, etc, because our poor pirate friends don’t typically get trusted links from anybody.]
It seems like that cracker group finally got around to realizing that their old keygen didn’t work anymore (the comments I saw were priceless — unrepeatable, but priceless), so they went ahead and cracked version 1.04. *yawn* Guess I’ll have to wait a day or two and then break their keygen again, since this time at least one of them actually does show up on Goooogle.
In the spirit of sticking it to pirates everywhere, I heartily support the #1 Google result for “Bingo Card Creator serial“, which is SharewareConnection’s excellent page on the subject. I think every download site should implement similar language (check the waaaay bottom of the page for why that page ranks for those search terms), because doing so would make it impossible to find the needle in the haystack. After all, its not like anyone is hotlinking the Bingo Card Creator keygen directly.
